Book review: Cold Justice by Lee Weeks

Pam Norfolk

Dark secrets from the past come back to haunt the family of a prominent London MP in a hard-hitting murder mystery from winter thriller queen Lee Weeks.

Author of Dead of Winter, Cold as Ice and Frozen Grave, Weeks makes a welcome return with her chalk-and-cheese murder squad detectives… brash, confident family man DI Dan Carter and his cautious and more private sidekick DC Ebony Willis.

The dynamic duo are shaping up into one of crime fiction’s top teams, delighting us with their unspoken camaraderie and forensic approach to investigation, and tackling high profile cases which often prove to be as brutal as they are baffling.

Only hours after a funeral is held for long-serving MP Jeremy Forbes-Wright – who was found dead in a high class London hotel – his two-year-old grandson Samuel is kidnapped from his buggy on a city street on a bone-chilling February afternoon.

The child had been in the care of his father, Toby Forbes-Wright, a quiet and introspective man who works at the Royal Observatory and is a genius at understanding the universe, but doesn’t have a clue about people, particularly women.

DI Dan Carter and DC Ebony Willis are called in to find the missing boy and very soon discover that all roads lead to a small Cornish town where Jeremy Forbes-Wright had a holiday home and where, 14 years earlier, a teenage girl called Kensa woke up after a drug-laced party to the terrible discovery that she had been raped.

Delving into the murky past of the town’s tight-knit community opens up the proverbial can of worms and to find little Samuel, Carter and Willis realise they must first track down the man who raped Kensa. But someone is murdering the people they need to speak to and time is fast running out…

Weeks plays a trump card in Cold Justice, delivering her best chiller thriller yet with a tense, twisting, turning plotline, a cast of credible, compelling characters and all set against the atmospheric backdrops of London and Cornwall.

Carter and Willis are a delightfully ill-assorted but powerful partnership, two opposites drawn together by dedication to their job, a desire to seek justice and shared moments of dark humour.